They are back. Johan Inger and Jens Sethzman are working together again:
“There was something interesting between us which was worth exploring further,” say Johan Inger and Jens Sethzman.
“The work had come so far that it felt important to continue it.”
And what was interesting, the thing that made the collaboration so worthwhile and important, consisted to a large extent of an open-ended process, a long series of conversations in which the meeting was permitted to give birth to the ideas.
“I felt that it was very inspiring, and this meant that even before I entered the rehearsal hall for the first time I had a pretty clear feeling for what the piece would be,” says Johan Inger.
The collaboration between the choreographer and until only recently Cullberg’s artistic director, Inger, and the set and lighting designer Sethzman was launched with the full-evening work Point of eclipse. A work with the same sort of power in the beautifully lighted room as in the cleanly-pared dance, a suggestive experience with a greater degree of abstraction than that to which Cullberg’s faithful audience had been accustomed.
This time it will be brighter, more playful – but just as boldly wide-open to the new. Open to an expression of which none of them knows where it will lead.
“Myself I want to be moved when I see dance; I want to see human beings. At the same time in my own creative process I have moved from an emotionally-based, more concrete expression towards the abstract, a cooler form focused on purity in the movement,” says Johan Inger.
“During the last few years I have become more interested in craftsmanship, in finding that which is pure in the dance, and not necessarily mucking it up with a ton of feelings. And out of this, by working with dynamics and energy building up a feeling which is even greater and more universal that the concrete: when a man meets a woman.”
And it is in this doubleness Johan Inger finds himself right now. An artistic process which finds its expression in the new work. Position of elsewhere consists of three parts where the first part involves a conquering of the room:
“The beginning is tremendously physical in a manic kind of way. The point of departure was to conquer and take up space with a manic, driving energy. This part is only about coming and taking, working one’s way in from the sides. In the second part I want there to ensue a kind of a meeting. In the third there is a parting; there once again it will be cleaned out and become pure.”
A three-part experience which also carries with it a kind of retrospective of Johan Inger’s five years as Cullberg Ballet’s artistic director.
When we meet, one month before the premičre, it is the second part which is giving Johan Inger a headache. In it he wants to introduce a bit of the playfulness and humour with which he has worked a lot previously, but this has turned out to be difficult.
“Perhaps I have left that expression behind, or maybe I have to find a new way into it.”
Johan Inger smiles with a slightly concerned shadow over his brow. Nonetheless he does not seem all too worried; it is in the moment of uncertainty in which art arises. Ideas are one thing, but it is the mistakes which are the interesting part, he himself feels.
For Cullberg Jens Sethzman is building rooms without concrete objects, creating charged spaces solely with the help of light.
“I have always worked with something which changed the room, something concrete for me to relate to. There has always been some bloody wall or something; so for me it has been scary to subject myself to this situation of not having anything to play with. Just having a bare stage means that I have to work with the room in another way.”
Jens Sethzman, who alongside his commission with Cullberg is also working with the set design for Elverket’s coming world premičre of Sara Stridberg’s drama “Medealand”, also gets going on the uncertainty aspect.
“Johan is heading in an entirely new direction, towards a new language, and it is an honour to be invited into this process.”
And he himself is contributing to the excitement by basing his scene design on a grand and technically complicated lighting solution which also serves as a sculptural object of its own. A formation consisting of six rings of light made of aluminium, between one and five metres in diameter, hung at three points, which means that they can be raised and lowered and even tilted. An ambitious construction, Jens Sethzman himself feels.
”At the same time as Johan is producing a great work and has an enormous store of materials and ideas, this is also a pretty grand idea which can carry itself. And I don’t know how much we are going to clash; it isn’t until we see it built that we can understand what it means for the whole.”
Johan Inger actually ended his position at Cullberg last summer, but the work with Position of elsewhere has kept him with the company all throughout the autumn. Not until after the premičre will he begin his new life as a freelance choreographer with the entire world as his place of work. The starting-point will be Seville in southern Spain where he will be moving with his family, and a fixed point for dance will be his old home stage, Nederlands Dans Theater, where he will be a house choreographer, charged with the task of creating one work per year.
“NDT is my home in many ways; it was there I found myself as a dancer and as a grown-up.”
Jenny Aschenbrenner
